Blog Post on Shipwreck Dataset

For this assignment, I chose a dataset consisting of all maritime events off the coast of New Jersey. All ships in this database were affected and were either lost or recovered.

I chose this dataset because I do think it is interesting. I wanted to see how ships get affected by weather such as abnormal tides, hurricanes, storms, and other sorts of disasters. This dataset is meaningful because it helps people who keep the shore area safe understand what happens to these ships and how the people prevent future disasters from happening.

No one person made this dataset. This was compiled using various sources across the web. Sources such as newspapers, ship logs, books on shipwrecks, US Coast guard reports, and captain’s logs. This data was made for Coast Guard officials or the US Naval Forces to examine and understand what is happening to these ships. This is important because on these ships, there are human lives onboard. They are at risk for when a ship gets caught out in a storm or other unfortunate scenario.

This dataset has been very meticulously well kept, and almost all the specifications of each recorded incident have been described. It has everything, the ship’s name, captain, cargo, passengers, crew, age, destination, departure, and specs. The only issue with this dataset is that there are holes in the data. There are cells in the spreadsheet where the value hasn’t been inputted, but that is most likely due to lack of outside information on a certain incident. Overall, not many flaws or limitations.

If I had questions that this dataset could answer, they would be:

1. What type of ship was the most affected? Were the wooden ships mostly affected due to bad weather, or is it the metal ships?

This question is an important question because that would confirm that a certain type of material could be too dangerous for ships to be made out of. If wooden ships were the most at risk to sink due to extreme weather, a warning could be put out in public to encourage the construction of stronger ships made out of metal, or vice versa.

1. Where did most of the ships come from, and where were they headed?

This question is of geographical importance because this would highlight dangerous routes between different countries or ports. There could be a maritime passage between two destinations that could be very storm prone and prove to be very deadly for passenger ships. There could be a warning issued to passengers talking about the risks of sea travel.

The dataset shows us that sea travel could be dangerous at times, and a fair few of these incidents had fatalities among them. An argument could be made that sea travel needs more regulation for safety for crew and passengers alike. This argument should be presented to official institutions such as the Coast Guard or the US Navy. This is to ensure the safety of everyone out at sea.